Chapter 191 Two Old Acquaintances
POV: Callum | The Feral Den, planning rooms
The maps take up two full tables pushed together and they cover London in the specific way military planning covers a city, which is as a series of defensible positions and access routes and choke points and vulnerabilities, and I have been looking at them for four hours with Cormac and Tom and three people from Fletcher's highland network and I am tired in the specific way that tired feels when it is not about sleep.
Cormac and I have been in rooms like this before. We have been in rooms like this as opponents and as cautious allies and as reluctant collaborators and as the version of brothers we have been working toward for the past two years, which is not uncomplicated but which is real. I know the way he thinks about a map. I know where he sees openings and where he sees traps and how he assesses risk, which is differently from how I assess it, and the difference is useful rather than a source of conflict in a way that it was not for a long time.
"They'll come from the south and east," Cormac says, his finger moving along the river on the map. "Covenant forces move through established vampire channels. American packs move differently, they'll come in dispersed and consolidate. The timing will be offset."
"The offset is the window," I say.
"The offset is the window," he agrees. "If we can engage one force before the other arrives, the joint invasion stops being joint and becomes sequential, which is a different problem."
"How long is the offset?"
"Six to twelve hours, depending on how well coordinated they are. Given that they agreed on the invasion approximately forty-eight hours after six months of not agreeing on anything, I would estimate their coordination is optimistic rather than operational."
Tom makes a note. Tom has been making notes continuously for four hours and his notes are the architecture of whatever we do next, the part that turns intention into logistics.
We were idiots, Cormac said to me two nights ago, when the joint invasion announcement had landed and we had been standing in the Feral Den afterward not saying anything for a while. He said it with the specific quality of a person who has thought about a thing long enough to say it plainly. Fighting each other while the system crushed us both. He was not performing remorse. He was stating a fact he had arrived at through three years of evidence.
We learned, I had said. Late, but we learned.
He had looked at the maps on the wall. Finn's old enough to know what a map is, he said. He can point to Scotland on a map.
I had not said anything about that, because it did not need a response.
It needs the door opening, which it does now, twenty minutes before midnight on the evening after the joint invasion announcement, and the person who opens it is not someone I expected tonight.
Moira walks in. She has the look of someone who has been traveling for two days and who has decided that the inconvenience of travel is preferable to the alternative, and behind her, in the doorway, is a child who has Cormac's jaw and Moira's eyes and who is holding a toy wolf with the careful grip of someone who takes his things seriously and who is looking at the room with the wide observant expression of a two-year-old encountering a lot of new information at once.
Cormac goes very still.
Moira looks at him with the specific expression she always has, the one that means she has already had the argument with herself and finished it. "He should know his father," she says. "And his uncle. We're staying. We fight together."
Finn looks at Cormac across the room.
Cormac crosses to them in four steps.